Home into a house

We are turning our home into a house. Our little slice of heaven, into a property with 20 acres. If I was the weepy type, I'd get teary eyed from the idea of leaving all of this behind. WHAT were we thinking?

I just have take a step back, and look at exactly what we were thinking

• Joe has been ready to switch up his job/career for the past 5 years
• Texas is too hot
• I've wanted to move back to Holland for a while
• This house has a LOT of maintenance, so much so, that sometimes we couldn't enjoy our little heaven, because we had too much work to keep it marginally kept up

These past few days have been insane. Since we got the updated repair list, we hired Joe's friend Luis to come help with repairs yesterday. They fixed drywall
Joe tore the rotted wood from the chicken coop and workshop, and replaced it with brand new siding.Simulaneously we also had to get ready for this morning's moving sale. That meant hauling all of the excess "crap" out of the house and workshop. I'd say the sale was a success, and it was total madness the first 2 hours. We had anticipated early birds, so we'd locked the gate at the end of the driveway. Good thing too, by 7.50am we had 4 trucks lined up. In the midst of the madness, the money was just flying into my pockets. My kids would hand me a 20 and tell me they need a 5 for change. Or buyers would give me money and say stuff like: that's $100 for the lawnmower plus this, that, and the other. I just had to take their word on it.

As with any other sale, despite of all the sales, we have a lot of leftovers. Most of that is going to Goodwill, but some of it needs to be sold on Ebay (what a pain!), or craigslist. I'm sure glad we started this selling process early!

The animals are the other thing that we started early with.

Cattle: sold, last week, still on our property

Chickens:Sold, today. Except.... one chicken was sneaky. Last night we caught all of them while they were sleeping, and we got all of them from the chicken coop. This afternoon, I went to the workshop, only to see a straggler chicken walking out of the bushes. Now I'm trying to decide whether we'll sell it too, or maybe have her as a ceremonial go-away dinner
Cat(s): Adopted. I'm not sure if it was fate, or just dumb luck, but one of our 2 cats disappeared just a few days ago. So now we only have 1 cat to adopt out: Patches. Patches is our longest surviving cat here at the ranch. We've had him for almost 2 years, which greatly surpasses any amount of time other cats have survived here.

Dog:Still up for adoption. We haven't actually put him on Craigslist yet, but we are confident someone will want to adopt him, especially being a good herd/guard dog. The day that Justin goes, will truly be a sad day for me. I'm not a dog person, but I love Justin. He's just such a good dog! He's obedient, friendly, protective, beautiful, and sweet. I'll miss him a lot!
Ducks: staying in the lake, with the house.

So Here I sit, in my usual spot, looking out a great sunset, and realizing it's one of the last few precious sunsets I'll experience at the farm.